Wildlife
50% increased range and number of workers for Gatherer, Hunter, Herbalist, Forester and Woodcutter. Also lower cost and building time of those buildings. Forest trees live longer and since your people are wildlife experts they gather wood and stone more effectively.

MoreTerrain
This Mod adds the 'Larger' and 'Huge' terrain size and some more terrain options: Swamp, Big Lake, Plains, Caldera and Flooded Plains.

Advanced Blacksmith
Blacksmith can produce charcoal (coal) from logs.

Cooper's Terrain Mod V2
Adds a bunch of different terrain to the game.

I’m a passionate gamer who enjoys pretty much any game going, my Steam collection is pretty vast (1100+ games at present) and contains everything from the latest blockbusters through to some lesser known but amazing gems of i ...(continue reading the full article)

Back in March we put up a job posting for a Community Manager position at Nexus Mods. I was looking for someone who was a part of the modding community who could be a friendly-face on the sites and would handle a lot of the PR and community side of things on the Nexus which has been lacking in recent years.

Over 400 people applied for the position and over the course of a couple of months I whittled down the applicant list to a "short-list" of 30 people, and then further down to a shorter-list of 4. Before I contacted these remaining 4 individuals, however, I met up with a close gaming friend f ...(continue reading the full article)

Over the past 24 hours the Nexus sites have gone down 3 times, sometimes for as much as an hour. It's school holiday season which means it's also DDoS season, typically a time when an abnormally high amount of DDoS attacks happen (logical conclusion is...?). We're told by our hosts that we are not the target but unfortunately we're being taken down due to the attacks happening against our host's and main data centre's infrastructure. It's nice to know we're not the target, at least, but obviously it still sucks.

As you might know we've been struggling with our forum server after the past few weeks and have been working towards getting them on the same Cloud setup that's worked so well for us with the main sites themselves.

However, we'd struggled to understand why, all of a sudden, the load times on the forums went from fine to absolutely awful in little to no time at all. There wasn't any sort of traffic spike and the servers weren't being constantly DDoS'd so there was no real reason for it. We knew it wasn't our database because the forums are running on the same database cluster that the sites are ...(continue reading the full article)

We're aware the forums have been largely inaccessible and now down since 11pm (GMT) on the 18th of June. In an unwelcome throwback to the 2013-2014 Nexus years the RAID controller on the forum server has seemingly packed in. Perhaps the forum server wanted to give us one last gift before we (had planned) to transition to the new cloud-based system over the weekend?

Thankfully all our database operations are stored on a 5-server database cluster unrelated to the forum server, so things like the member database, posts, topics, etc. are all fine, dandy and indeed all working from the NexusMods.com ...(continue reading the full article)

I just wanted to provide a quick update. While I haven't been able to reach a computer at all this weekend I'm aware that the servers have been slower than usual over the past few days.

The root cause of this issue is a database cluster node that got knocked out Saturday afternoon, meaning we've been running on 4 nodes instead of the usual 5. On top of that we're currently seeing higher than usual traffic, about 22% more than a usual Sunday, so not only are we running at 20% less power capacity but we're also serving 22% more users. I'm not entirely sure what the traffic bump is attributed to b ...(continue reading the full article)

Mods having bugs in them is nothing new. If you've used or released at least a few mods in your time you'll have come across certain "features" in the mod that probably aren't supposed to be and weren't intended to be there.

Up until now if you came across a bug in a mod you'd have to report it either in the file's comments or as a private message to the author of the mod themselves. Very few mod authors have set up their own bug reporting systems on their own hosting solutions for reporting bugs on their files.

Since the announcement of paid modding last week the internet has been awash with discussion on the topic from all angles and extremes. I myself have written over 10,000 words on the topic over the past month.

I have had to remind myself that I had the privilege of having a bit of forewarning about this happening; I had time to go through all the mental states, think of lots of the permutations and think of all the different arguments for and against the system, so when the announcement came, the shock for me was not knowing when it would happen or how they would do it, rather than not knowing ...(continue reading the full article)

Valve and Bethesda have announced that they have removed the payment feature from Steam Workshop effective immediately. Refunds have been sent out to anyone who paid for a mod using the system.

Bethesda's blog piece originally defended the system and was then later updated. However, I think it's an amazingly good read. You may not agree with everything written within it, but it is well written and shares key insights in to Bethesda's thinking when they went in to this endeavour. Frankly, if they had written and released that blog piece when they'd first announced the paid workshop fu ...(continue reading the full article)

I'm going to preface this news post by telling you to read the entire article, to the bottom before you run off and start quoting things left right and centre out of context. With that said...

Yesterday, Steam's new Paid Workshop had its first casualty as Chesko pulled his mods off the site. He made a post on Reddit explaining his decision, and took a pop at the Nexus at the bottom by saying:

QUOTE

I am also considering removing my content from the Nexus. Why? The problem is that Robin et al, for perfectly good political reasons, have positioned themselves as essentially the champions of free mod